WAS ALLIE READY to open up, to anyone, let alone Sam Walker? She could feel herself leaning away from what he was offering.
But then it was as if she heard her grandmother’s voice. A burden is made lighter for sharing it. She knew she would feel lighter if the secret she carried was revealed.
“Tell me about how your life got side-tracked,” he invited softly. “It seems to me you would have made the best teacher ever.”
She contemplated that, that he had listened to her. Why not tell him what had happened to her? The stars were winking out, he was a solid presence beside her, she had seen his gentle, firm way with Cody.
Why not trust him?
Because the world has taught you the danger of trusting, a voice inside her said, and this time it was not her grandmother’s voice.
To her surprise, she chose to ignore that voice. She chose to throw caution to the wind.
“I had just completed my sophomore year at university. It was a small campus, so everyone was shocked, and really excited, that the show American Singing Star chose us as a location to hold tryouts. People knew I sang, and everyone wanted me to try out. There was quite a lucrative financial prize, so there I found myself in front of a panel of judges.”
“American Singing Star? The television show?” he asked.
She had the horrifying thought he might have seen her spectacular fall from grace. “Yes, have you seen it?”
“No, I have to say television isn’t my thing. Until Cody. Now it’s SpongeBob SquarePants, Rugrats, Doug. But I know what it is. Kind of an offshoot of that really famous reality singing show, right?”
“Yes, that’s the one. Anyway, I did fairly well. I got to the finals. And then I failed. It was quite a ride, from soaring successes to utter humiliation, all conducted under the unforgiving lens of the public eye.”
“That seems like the short version,” Sam said. “Why didn’t you go back to school after it didn’t pan out?”
“The whole thing was so public. For a while everyone knew who I was.” And hated me. “It’s dying down now, a bit.”
“So, you are hiding here,” he said softly.
She shot him a look. “A conclusion you had already arrived at?”
He lifted a shoulder and looked at her, his eyes on her face making her feel there was no keeping secrets from him. “You’re a lovely young woman who told me you don’t believe in happily-ever-after. Why don’t you tell me about that part?”
“Maybe another time,” she said, thinking it would be way too easy to tell him everything.
“I can go look online,” he said. “You already told me whatever happened played out publicly.”
She sighed. The stars were winking on above them, and the waves were picking up. She could hear their gentle lapping turning into crashing. What would Gram tell her to do?
The temptation of being relieved in some way of this burden was too much to resist. To have someone, anyone, know the truth.
“At first,” she said, “everything about that show was exciting. They gave me a different name, one of those one-name things like Cher. They redid the original audition tape, with me coming out and introducing myself as Tempest.
“Of course it was obvious I was the furthest thing from a tempest you could imagine. I was a small-town college kid in pigtails and jeans. One of the judges—the same one who suggested the change to one name—rolled his eyes. I should have realized how scripted everything was, right then, that it was really live theater. And maybe I did, but it was all so exciting.
“I kept getting put forward to the next round. I was like this instant celebrity—singers I’d admired were inviting me to their homes. There was talk of record deals and guest spots at concerts and collaborations. It was all very heady stuff.”
“But?” he asked.
“They were telling me how to dress, and doing my hair and doing my makeup. They gave us a place to live—all the finalists in this fancy-fancy mansion built into the hills, with a pool. At the time it felt right. It felt as if this glossy, beautiful, beloved by-the-public creature, Tempest, was who I was always meant to be.
“There was a guy in the same competition. We were under the same strains. Ryan was cute. He was friendly. I started leaning on him, and he on me. It became more and more romantic. I didn’t realize how much of our relationship was being orchestrated. Looking back, there was probably a subplot in play from the first audition.
“The script probably read something like this—wholesome, small-town geek, whose music style is folksy, will fall for big-city super-suave rock star type. As the competition moves along, the geek will become more and more glamourous and superficial, and he will become more and more down-to-earth, with his heart on his sleeve.
“A romance among the two most popular contestants was great for the show. Imagine what that did for ratings! But I was oblivious to all that. Ryan was part of this exciting new future that was going to be mine. I was head over heels for him and I thought he was for me. He was always doing these crazy little things—presenting me with bouquets of dandelions, drawing hearts in lipstick on my dressing room mirror, sneaking kisses, making promises and plans.
“Gone was the studious girl whose greatest ambition had been to teach kindergarten, meet a nice guy someday, get married, have a few kids. Ryan insisted we were going to be as famous as other megastar couples and that our music and our love was our ticket to the whole world.
“The night before the final competition, Ryan told me it was all fake. He’d been put up to the whole thing by the show’s producers. He didn’t love me. He didn’t even think of the dandelion bouquets or the lipstick hearts himself.
“I was devastated. Did they know how devastated I would be? I don’t know, but I think they did. I think I was played like a fiddle. I couldn’t pull myself together for the final show. I didn’t even want to win anymore. I didn’t care enough.
“But he did. Oh, Ryan went on that final show, live, and talked about how I had broken him in two. He sang a heart-wrenching ballad about treachery and lost love. He even squeezed out a tear with his final note.”
Sam said a word under his breath that he could not say around Cody, but that summed up how she felt exactly.
“This adoring public, this mega fan base, turned on me in a blink. I went from being America’s sweetheart to the most hated person on the planet. I couldn’t turn on a television set without some entertainment guru weighing in on it.
“Social media lit up with everyone commenting on how despicable I was. I cut my hair, and people still recognized me, though most weren’t quite as nasty in person, thank goodness, as when they were hiding behind their keyboards. Still, I had to wear a disguise to go get groceries, oversize sunglasses and a ball cap. Going back to school, where everyone had been so proud of me, seemed out of the question.
“And so I retreated to here. To my grandmother, who never lost sight of who I really was, even when I did, and to this place. She got rid of the television. She was sick, but she seemed to rally to help me. We played cards, and cooked and sewed together, and talked and talked and talked. Looking back it was the worst of times, because she was sick and I was hurting, but also the best of times, because we were together in such an intense, loving way.
“But I can’t seem to write songs anymore, not even the jingle I’ve been hired to write. Tonight is the first time, in a long time, I’ve actually played my guitar and sang. And you know what was great about it? It wasn’t about me. It was about the music bringing joy. Somehow, that’s part of what I’ve lost.”
She didn’t realize she had started crying until he placed a finger on her cheeks and caught a tear.
And then he gathered her in his arms, and held her with such exquisite tenderness that she thought it was possible to die from it.
“My turn to thank you,” she managed to choke out.
“That’s a lot to carry by yourself,” he said. “Where’s your family in all this? Especially since Mavis died?”
“Humph,” she said, against his chest.
“I remember you saying once, in passing, your mother disapproved of you. Because of this?”
She was stunned by how carefully he had listened and by how intuitive he was. Somehow, that was not what she would have expected from him.
“When people think of mothers they think of PTA and cookies, but my mom wasn’t like that. She was a single mom, and darned proud of it, a career woman who made her own way. She referred to my father as the donor. I actually thought I was a product of a sperm bank.
“She was a professor of economics at that same small-town college I ended up going to. She was a nontraditional person in a very traditional town. I craved every single thing she eschewed about that town—neat little houses behind trimmed hedges, churches with Sunday services, marriage, families with mommies and daddies, babies. I wanted to celebrate normal Christmases, she wanted to shop and go to plays in New York. I wanted to spend summers here at the beach with my grandmother, but I only got a few weeks. The rest of the time I was dragged off to Europe with her.
“When I went to college to study early childhood education, my mother was appalled. She saw that choice as reflecting a shocking lack of ambition. She wasn’t totally behind the whole American Singing Star thing, but she applauded the ambition. She actually let it slip that maybe I took after my father. I wheedled it out of her that he’d been a college music teacher by day, and a guitar player in a band at night.
“She disliked Ryan, and saw our great romance for what it was—a sham. She saw right through him. But if I expected sympathy after the big public humiliation, what I got instead was a kind of self-satisfied I told you so, as if being right was far more important to her than my feelings.”
Sam said that word he couldn’t say around Cody again. His fury on her behalf made her sniffle again.
“Anyway, she took a position as a visiting fellow at Oxford shortly after it all happened, and I came here.”
“Aw, Allie...”
It was the genuine tenderness in his voice that undid her. The tears came, hard, soaking his chest.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “This is the second time I’ve fallen apart on you, and gotten your shirt all wet. You’ll think I’m such a crybaby. And nothing could be further from the truth.”
“Liar,” he said, and that same tender note in his voice kept it from stinging. At all.
Still, she felt honor bound to correct him. “No, really. It’s not a lie. I’m very strong. Independent. Resilient.”
“Uh-huh.”
It was pretty hard to make a case for strength, when she’d already admitted she was hiding from the world. Suddenly, it did not feel like such a bad thing to be seen.
Allie just wanted to know what he saw. She pulled back from him, and studied his face. When had it become so familiar to her that she felt she knew every plane of it, and every nuance of expression?
“What do you see?” she asked, wondering if she was ready for his answer.
Without even a moment’s hesitation, Sam said, “I see you as compassionate, sensitive, creative.”
He lifted her chin with his finger and scanned her face. Her arguments caught in her throat.
“But not strong,” she said.
“The world has quite enough strong people. The world needs you.”
“Ha,” she said.
“No, I’m not kidding. It’s people like you,” he told her softly, “who have the hardest job. You have to try and make the world more beautiful. Paint the pictures. Tell the stories. Sing the songs.”
“I don’t sing anymore. Not publicly, anyway.”
He seemed to consider that, and then, as if words could not be enough to express what he was feeling, Sam lowered his head and touched his lips to her lips.
Not in a sexual way.
In a far more powerful way. In a way that said he saw her. And approved of what he saw.
But the kiss was like a tiny spark held to the dry tinder of her soul. Allie felt something white-hot blaze through her. She might have deepened that kiss into something quite different, but Sam stood up abruptly.
“Shoot. I forgot the milk,” he said, his voice pure gravel, as he stared down at her. “I better go grab it before the store closes.”
Sam drove away from the cottage feeling two things: a kind of helpless tenderness toward Allie, and a kind of impotent fury at the world and how it had treated her.
And maybe he reserved a touch of that impotent fury for himself. What was he thinking kissing his landlady?
But this went deeper, and he was aware he had felt such fury only once before, when Sue and Adam had been killed.
The events, he knew, were not on the same scale, but the feeling was so similar: a kind of helplessness in the face of life’s unfairness, in the face of cruelty to people who did not deserve it. Allie had been manipulated and betrayed and it made him so angry he wanted to punch someone.
Still, no matter what he was feeling, surely kissing her had not been a proper response to that?
And yet, what other way, to let her know, he saw her. In the past few days, he felt as if he had seen who she really was.
He knew he shouldn’t do it, but he did it anyway. He pulled over to the side of the road and yanked out his phone.
He searched Tempest, American Singing Star. He only watched half of one of her performances.
It was not that she wasn’t talented. It was not that she couldn’t sing.
It was that he could barely recognize her with the long, jet-black hair, the false eyelashes, the form-fitting black leather outfit.
Watching her performance only intensified the helpless rage he felt at all of them: the show, Ryan, her mother.
He turned off the phone. He put the car back in Drive. He went to the store and got milk. It was on his way out the door of the store that he stopped, stunned by his realization.
For the first time since the accident had taken Adam and Sue, he genuinely cared about someone outside of the walls of his little world.
He wasn’t ready.
And life hadn’t asked him if he was.